So papers, etc. turned into my professors become university property?

[Hyperlite]

We had an academic ethics speaker in to talk to the class last week, and she kept going on about this...The fact that all assignments turned into a teacher or professor become university property, and you need to be careful not to "Plagerize Yourself." If found this very suprising, and intellectual property rights/laws came to mind. is this really true now after the whole intellectual property movement? or does it not have any effect on it? She also said that professors were required to ask you for permission to reuse anything you submitted, which didn't seem to mesh...why, if said item was university property, would they be required to get your permission?' i'm confuzzled.

 

[MrCodeDude]

Maybe there is a clause in your contract with the school that any creative works submitted to professors, you are surrending your legal ownership?

 

[Circlenaut]

Rofl plagerizing yourself. What a world!

 

[Ryan]

Originally posted by: Pippy
Rofl plagerizing yourself. What a world!

You're not plagiarizing yourself - you're plagiarizing your work. How can true learning ever come from retreading your own work?

 

[Circlenaut]

Originally posted by: Ryan

Originally posted by: Pippy
Rofl plagerizing yourself. What a world!

You're not plagiarizing yourself - you're plagiarizing your work. How can true learning ever come from retreading your own work?

I know, I know. True knowledge only comes from growth of the mind. I just find it interesting when we can plagerize our own work. It just makes me laugh inside.

Edit: Err I was thinking of esseys/written work which I find very personal. But I realize now that this often happens to any profession where a person works for a company.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: Pippy
Rofl plagerizing yourself. What a world!

This is actually more complicated than it is funny.

 

[Quasmo]

When I make a movie at my school it's not considered mine.

 

[imported_Cameron]

lol, one of my professors actually brought that up the other day. Some student almost got kicked out for plagiarizing himself.

 

[CravenTacos]

It just doesn't seem right when you're paying them for a service and they take ownership of your work. The only case of 'self-plagiarizing' that makes sense to me is when you submit the same work to two different newspapers/magazines and are paid for both, or trying to re-sell an older work and representing it as new.

back on topic....what pisses me off is that schools profit from your papers and their own paranoia. most big schools collect papers into a database and then compare all subsequent work with this database to detect cheaters. many of these schools also SELL these databases to other schools or companies specializing in this (turnitin for example) without your permission.

 

[phisrow]

Even if what she said is technically true, under a strict definition, a licence agreement, or some obscure court ruling, it sounds like your Academic ethics speaker has her priorities seriously out of whack.

Plagiarism as a concept doesn't really rest on intellectual property concepts. I'm sure that, if your school is run by real scum, or you invent something valuable enough to fight over, they will claim that they own your work; but that isn't what makes plagiarism a problem.

Plagiarism is any unattributed inclusion of outside material into a given piece of your work(unless such outside material is considered to be common/trivial knowledge within your discipline. It has nothing whatsoever to do with who "owns" the material. So, you can cite yourself, you can cite the work of others(whether or not it is their property, and whether or not they agree to the citation), you can cite public domain works and so on. You just cannot include an outside element without citation.

She should have just discussed how plagiarism is a form of academic fraud, misrepresentation of the source of material, and left the whole stupid discussion of property out of it. Her argument makes it sound like you aren't allowed to use other people's writings at all, while it would be ok to copy wholesale from anybody's work as long as you bought their property rights first. That is incredibly stupid. I can't believe they actually let people like her lecture to university students.

 

[Eska]

lmao @ the stupidity of ur professor